Mary McCarthy once said, “The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen.” The story “August Heat” by W.F. Harvey can relate in a lot of ways with this quote, the author was the one that came up with the idea for his story in which coincidence brings two men together in a very twisted scenario. This story begins in a very normal day only to turn itself into a mystery of what will tomorrow hold for these two men. Suspense can be created in many different ways, but W.F. Harvey creates the suspense in his story in a very unique way in which at first reading it, one thinks that it has nothing to do with mystery and that it will not lead to that. However, it slowly but surely …show more content…
Percy D’Aco explains this strategy as: “Writers may create suspense by withholding information from the reader—for instance, how a crime was committed or who committed it. One way to withhold information is to include a narrator who is not trustworthy: He or she may or may not be trying to manipulate the reader.” (Source 1). This is what Harvey incorporators into his story, the protagonist, James Clarence Withencroft, draws a criminal and later that day he meets him while, he was working on a gravestone, when he is finished he shows James Clarence Withencroft, and to his surprise his name is on that gravestone, but the man says that he just came up with the name because it came to him that was all. However, the part of his name being on it wasn’t mentioned to the very end when the man was finished working on the gravestone. However, the information that Harvey withholds is the fact that James Clarence Withencroft ends up asking the man if there is anything that he could be put for trail and to his surprise the man says no. In this case, what is it that he is being convicted of when James Clarence Withencroft. This is the part in which the reader doesn’t what is the right or wrong answer; it is only left to their own personal assumption of what ended up